The Web Museum
"The Web Museum" by Richard Rhodes, Spring 2008, p. 22
One of the stories in this issue is “Archaeologies of the Present,” by the curator Jens Hoffmann. With his usual élan, Hoffmann delivers an overview of changing curatorial circumstances over the past two decades. It makes as concise a contemporary-art history as you will fi nd, beginning with the mega-shows and curatorial heroes of the 1980s and progressing to the present-day dominance of the not-quite-curated commercial art fairs (a subject also covered in this issue by the writer and artist Eldon Garnet, in his report on last fall’s Frieze Art Fair).
The photo research for “Archaeologies” proved illuminating in unexpected ways. Since the article did not demand anything specific in terms of illustration, we ran a Google image search on a few of the exhibitions in Hoffmann’s curatorial chronology to see what would turn up. If the show occurred within the last decade, the answer was: a lot. The Internet is rich with JPEG images linked to sites that can offer new contexts to explore. Type in the name of the Chinese curator Hou Hanru and you find upwards of 40 pages of images, 20 images to a page, all connected to his name. Not all the threads lead to the man or his curatorial projects, but some do, and with every click, the range of his work fills out. Suddenly you can find yourself looking at a street scene in Istanbul, seeing a gap in a row of buildings filled with dining-room chairs stacked three storeys high—a project by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, who was part of the 2003 Istanbul biennial (Hou curated last year’s Istanbul biennial). Eventually the images linked to Hou connect with other names and institutions mentioned in Hoffmann’s essay. From a single entry point, a wider art world comes into view.
But only to a point. Try looking up “Cologne art scene, 1980s”—one of the first references Hoffmann makes. The result is a wasteland of irrelevant material that has little to do with the art scene that was once the hub of European art production. Before London and Berlin emerged as current art centres, Cologne was the European focal point for transatlantic art traffic. Galleries run by Michael Werner, Rudolf Zwirner and Paul Maenz were at the crossroads of new German painting and photography and its intersection with North American art. The art world we inhabit has at least some of its roots in this small city on the Rhine, but to the Internet, our most significant contemporary communications technology, it is invisible. The same applies to some of the other major exhibitions of the 1980s, from documenta 7 and 8 to “Les Magiciens de la terre,” the groundbreaking 1989 Paris exhibition mentioned by Hoffmann. These were important, influential events that, while well documented in their original print catalogues, are now fundamentally out of the loop in terms of contemporary image circulation.
Some interesting art has gone missing. History now divides itself into the eras of before and after the arrival of the World Wide Web and its flood of available imagery. The Internet has become our primary sorting and research tool; it defines relevance. It is the newest and largest museum of art. There is great promise in its openness and accessibility, but it needs shaping on both sides of the digital divide. The art of the future needs a reliable record of the art of the past. The new archaeology digs in JPEGs.
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